


Fetish

by codswallop



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Consentacles, Katsu remains undebauched, M/M, Mori is an excellent inventor, Not Katsu's tentacles, Sex Toys, Tentacles, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:08:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21821953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/codswallop/pseuds/codswallop
Summary: “What did you mean,” Thaniel asked, hesitant, unsure if he wanted to know the answer, “that it wasn’t some strange fetish?”Or: Thaniel is curious about tentacles. Mori enjoys satisfying his curiosity.
Relationships: Keita Mori/Thaniel Steepleton
Comments: 19
Kudos: 80
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Fetish

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trismegistus (Lebateleur)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lebateleur/gifts).



> I'm sorry. It's just been killing me that this fandom doesn't have any tentacle play in it yet. Dear Trismegistus, I am taking you at your word that it's okay to run with an idea I've been looking for an excuse to write, but if this kink isn't to your liking, please feel free to ignore!
> 
> If it helps, this tentacle play is explicitly consensual, and Katsu isn't involved at all. (I really could not bring myself to use Katsu in such a manner.)

“What did you mean,” Thaniel asked, hesitant, unsure if he wanted to know the answer, “that it wasn’t some strange fetish?” 

It was late in the evening, the relaxed time of day after supper when Six and next door’s children had all been coerced somehow into sleep, and the Knightsbridge shoppers had gone home to consume and preen over their purchases. Thaniel had gradually let his translation work fall away unregarded while he watched Mori perform some minor repairs to Katsu, who’d been listing to one side for the past few days.

Mori, his hands deep in octopodlian gearwork, didn’t look up. “Hm?”

The single abstracted syllable was an escape hatch, but Thaniel’s curiosity wouldn’t allow him to take it. “The first time I met Katsu,” he persisted, “you said, ‘it’s only clockwork, it’s not some strange fetish.’ What sort of fetish would that be, then?”

“Oh.” Mori kept working. He cleared his throat, and then that was all for a while. Thaniel might have thought he wasn’t listening properly, except that the skin just above Mori’s cheekbones looked suddenly taut. Eventually, he closed Katsu back up with a decisive clack in F sharp and set the little octopus down. It gave a trilling coo and slithered sideways off the worktable, then scrambled away in the direction of the kitchen, set to rights once more. 

Thaniel was about to decide that Mori’s failure to answer his question was all the answer he was going to get, but Mori was on his feet now, reaching for something high on one of his bookshelves. His fingers skated across a row of volumes he was just tall enough to reach, but not to grasp, and he made a frustrated sound. Thaniel stepped hastily forward.

“That one,” Mori said, pointing. “Scarlet binding. Hokusai.” When Thaniel handed it down to him, he leafed through it quickly at first, then slowly. His shoulders drew down as he allowed himself to become absorbed in one of the images on the page. Then he appeared to recollect Thaniel in a swift upward unreadable glance at him, and turned the pages again until he found what he’d been looking for. “Ah. _The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife_ ,” he said, and then, a bit apologetically, “It’s shunga.”

Thaniel felt his eyebrows scrunch together. “Shunga. Spring...picture?” Then the other meaning of “spring” in Japanese occurred to him, and he took an involuntary step back from the book that Mori was now proffering. 

Mori laughed. “It’s art, Thaniel, not poison. Although it did require some sleight of hand to bring it into the country with me. But surely I’ve debauched you enough by now that a mere image can’t do much more damage.”

Thaniel made a face at him and then attempted to hide his blush by looking down at the book. He’d thought he was at least half prepared for the nature of what he might see there, but it fell short of his imaginings in some ways and went so far beyond it in others that he couldn’t safely look up at first, and yet continuing to look down at the picture seemed equally impossible. He froze, peeked up at Mori keenly watching him, and did the only thing he could do: broke down in gales of helpless laughter.

Mori smiled back. “You did ask,” he reminded Thaniel. “I’ll go and make tea now so that you can properly compose yourself. _Englishmen_ ,” he added, as he did at least once a day on average, disgusted and fond.

He left the volume open on the table when he left the room, however, and after a while, the noise of tea-making in the kitchen turned to the splashier sounds of dishwashing, perhaps slightly louder dishwashing than was strictly necessary. Thaniel looked at the picture again. He looked for a long while, and then he began to turn the pages of the book, carefully, with one finger, and caught his breath. After what felt like another long while, he closed the volume and went upstairs, his footsteps definitely louder than was strictly necessary.

Mori followed him up, soon after.

*

“You found the Hokusai inspiring, then,” Mori said, still panting a bit. Thaniel liked the firelight in his bedroom. He felt braver in the firelight.

“Suppose I did,” he admitted. “I’d been imagining...lots of arms for hugging? Er...fondling, perhaps? Not so much…”

“Penetration?” Mori guessed, giving him a penetrating look, and Thaniel scrunched his face and bit his lower lip and tried not to shudder and finally laughed, nodding. 

“That, yes.” He was getting used to Mori’s straightforwardness in bed. He told himself, anyway, that he was. He’d no idea whether this directness about matters of erotic nature was because the watchmaker was Japanese or because he was so much older and more experienced or simply because he was Keita Mori—probably all of the above. Thaniel found himself hoping that his experience didn’t extend to experiments with real or synthetic sea creatures, and thought about asking, but decided not to.

Mori answered him anyway. “I haven’t, no. I like octopuses because they’re intelligent and unusual, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Thaniel said faintly.

“But it could be interesting. Katsu’s quite good at cuddling, and it’s easy enough to reset his random gears to—”

“No, no,” Thaniel protested. “God. I’d never be able to look him in the eye again.” He did shudder now, and Mori smiled in the dark and wrapped his arms around him tightly, nuzzling at the hollow of Thaniel’s throat.

“You don’t seem to have a problem looking me in the eye,” Mori told him. “Penetration notwithstanding.”

Thaniel thought, deliberately and with intention, about the first morning he’d woken up in Mori’s arms in full daylight. 

Mori hummed and lifted his head. He kissed the bridge of Thaniel’s nose, right where he’d kissed him on that distant morning, when Thaniel’s eyes had begun to water from the effort of making himself hold Mori’s serious black gaze and all that it contained. “Octopus eyes are alien, not human,” Mori conceded. “I suppose I see your point. Even so, if—”

Thaniel stopped his mouth with a kiss, then pulled away laughing and turned over, settling into his pillow, facing the wall and taking one of Mori’s arms with him to wrap snugly around his chest. “I’m done. I’m not going to bed with your mechanical pet octopus, and now I’ve set the bar as high as I possibly can with things I’d never have been able to imagine myself saying out loud a year ago. Good night, Keita.”

“Good night, my Thaniel,” Mori said, his voice glowing bright gold with amusement, and kissed the back of his neck again, again, again, each time more softly than the last, until Thaniel relaxed, smiling, into sleep.

*

“I’ve made you something,” Mori announced a few weeks later, entering Thaniel’s room where he’d been half-drowsing over a book in bed, waiting for Mori to come up. “It doesn’t have eyes.”

Thaniel looked blank. “Oh?”

Mori set an object down on the low table next to Thaniel’s side of the bed. It was unremarkable; a palm-sized smooth metal oblong, like a bar of soap. Mori’s voice had been shadowed with meaning, though, so Thaniel put his book aside and tried to look more awake. 

“It took longer than I expected,” Mori was saying now. “It’s extremely difficult to make multidirectional metal joints that won’t catch on skin; I had to try out a few different coatings that won’t be invented for decades yet. I did test it,” he added. “And cleaned it, after, of course.”

“Of course,” Thaniel repeated mechanically, still feeling stupid with sleep. “What...is it?” and Mori sighed and reached over to press an invisibly small button or switch somewhere on the thing. A thin tentacle emerged slowly from its surface, glistening with oil, and began groping the air blindly. Another tentacle emerged beside it, and another.

“All right,” Thaniel said. “I’m awake now. This is for…”

“For you,” Mori said patiently. “If you want it.”

*

Thaniel gasped at the cool touch of the oiled metal. He’d allowed Mori to undress him, to press his warm mouth against bits of Thaniel’s shivering skin as they were uncovered, and then to place the device between his open legs. It had felt like a dream, in the low light of the fading fire, but the exploratory touch of the alien protrusion at Thaniel’s entrance woke him up entirely.

“I can make it retract at any time,” Mori assured him, his voice low and warm at Thaniel’s ear. “How does it feel?” 

Thaniel made a face and reminded his body to relax into the possibility of pleasure, the way he’d had to remind himself during some of Keita’s early explorations. “Very...odd,” he managed, as the thin tentacle unwound and expanded inside of him. He felt the tip of it curl and uncurl, and gasped again as a second tentacle flickered out to tickle at him just where the first was pushing in. “Interesting? Not...not unpleasant.”

“Hmm,” said Mori. He reached down and touched something on the device, and the tentacle inside of Thaniel at once seemed to grow thicker and more insistent, while the second one pushed in alongside it and began to slide slyly in and out, not quite in a rhythm he could grasp onto. Thaniel shut his eyes as his spine arched involuntarily. 

“Yes,” he was able to say, just. “Yes, that’s, oh. Keita. Yes.”

Mori hummed assent. There was a third, now, winding itself around the stiffening length of him, gripping and squeezing in ripples, and...others, snaking out to wrap around his thighs and hold them open, while Thaniel trembled and gulped for air. His mind couldn’t seem to grasp what was happening to his body, on him and inside of him. It felt like being gently and cleverly rearranged at the circuit level, as if he were one of Mori’s creations, responding helplessly to the watchmaker’s intimate manipulations. The tentacles pulsed, thickened and thinned, curled and twisted and delved; there were so _many_ of them now, so relentless, so deep— Thaniel sobbed out a cry of wordless ecstasy, and shook, and shook, and shook. 

When he became gradually aware of things outside of his own body again, the first thing Thaniel noticed was the warmth of Keita’s hand, stroking circles around his abdomen as the last of the tentacles withdrew. Thaniel gave a deep, shuddering sigh. He felt damp and limp, wrung out, used up, twitching randomly as his nerve endings continued to give off little shocks of electrical current. 

Mori kissed his temple. “I’ll put it down as a success, then?”

Words were slow to produce themselves in Thaniel’s brain, which still wanted only to communicate in firework-bursts of colour and snatches of Mozart. “You’re not...Keita, you’re not. Thinking of...selling those?”

Mori laughed, a bright thin bubble of sound. “I’d either be knighted or arrested,” he said. “No. Strictly for personal use.”

Thaniel reached down with shaking hands and picked up the little oblong which had just taken him apart. It looked entirely innocuous. Then again, so did Mori, at first glance. “Well. Thank you?” Thaniel said. “I...enjoyed that. To say the least. And you’re amazing, obviously.” The words seemed deeply inadequate, but Mori seemed to relax around them like Katsu spreading out all his arms in a patch of sudden sunlight, and it was only then that Thaniel realised how closely and tensely Mori had been watching him, waiting for Thaniel’s final verdict.

“I’m glad,” Mori said simply, and Thaniel regathered his strength and reached for him, ready now to demonstrate his appreciation.

*

It was at least a week after that before Thaniel could interact with Katsu without blushing, for all that the octopus had remained innocent and uninvolved. Eye contact was out of the question for some time. Then Thaniel grew accustomed to the strangeness, and forgot, as he’d grown happily accustomed to so many of the strange pleasures of his Filigree Street existence. One could get used to anything, it seemed. Not inured—he hoped never that—but accepting of unexpected sources of bliss. Even ones that had once seemed entirely, laughably forbidden.


End file.
